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Dodgers Sink the Three-Way Trade for Johnson

The Yankees' quest to acquire Randy Johnson has returned to where it began more than six months ago.

A three-team trade involving the Yankees, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Los Angeles Dodgers, which had seemed near completion and would have sent the 41-year-old Johnson to the Bronx, fell apart yesterday when the Dodgers backed out. The Yankees then began negotiating exclusively with the Diamondbacks and expressed optimism that they would ultimately land Johnson during the off-season. Still, they have now failed to do so on three occasions, and yesterday's events also raised questions about Yankees pitcher Javier Vazquez, who was one of the key players in the three-way deal.

But as one superstar at least temporarily slipped from the Yankees' grasp, another was in their midst. Team officials, including the principal owner George Steinbrenner, met yesterday with the free-agent outfielder Carlos Beltran for an hour and a half at the Yankees' complex in Tampa, Fla. Though no contract offer was made, each side expressed interest.

Few people in baseball expected the Yankees to extend a contract yesterday. The consensus is that the Yankees, with their ability to spend, have the upper hand in the bidding for Beltran, who is certain to end up with the richest free-agent contract this winter.

As yesterday began, there was widespread anticipation that the three teams involved in the Johnson trade would send a signed agreement to Commissioner Bud Selig's office so that he could approve the deal. Instead, the Dodgers' owner, Frank McCourt, informed Randy Levine, the Yankees' president, and the Arizona ownership -- in separate telephone calls -- that he wanted out of the trade.

The collapse was surprising, given the advanced stage of the talks, but the Yankees have become used to such setbacks in their pursuit of Johnson. The Yankees' attempts to trade prospects for him in July were rebuffed because they did not have talented, relatively cheap players on their major league roster to offer Arizona, and the Diamondbacks also did not have enough interest in the players in the Yankees' increasingly unproductive minor league system.

The Yankees then renewed conversations with Arizona in the off-season, offering Vazquez, who went into a tailspin in the second half of the 2004 season, for Johnson. But the Yankees halted the discussions three weeks ago, because they said the Diamondbacks were asking for too much.

Yankees officials said that Arizona insisted upon the Yankees' paying the $19.5 million difference in the money owed Johnson, who is signed through 2005, and the money owed Vazquez, who is signed through 2007. Arizona also wanted four prospects from the Yankees, and either the setup man Tom Gordon or a starting pitcher from another team who was on a list of 10 pitchers provided by the Diamondbacks.

When the Yankees halted the talks, a team official said of the Diamondbacks, "It doesn't appear they were ever really serious."

The Yankees have to hope that Arizona is now willing to lower its price, given that Johnson has made it clear, again, that he does not want to pitch for the Diamondbacks, even though they recently acquired two expensive free agents -- Troy Glaus and Russ Ortiz -- in an effort to rebuild quickly.

Rather than having an unhappy Johnson, Arizona seems resigned to trading its ace. The question is what they will ask from the Yankees in a two-way trade and whether both teams might try to find another team to replace the Dodgers in a three-way deal.

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Whether Arizona even wants Vazquez is uncertain. His value might have taken a blow yesterday when Dodgers General Manager Paul DePodesta, in a conference call with reporters to discuss the deal's demise, said he had a health concern about one of the players. It was an apparent reference to Vazquez, who would have gone to the Dodgers in the complicated trade, along with two Yankees minor leaguers.

Vazquez, 28, was 10-5 for the Yankees going into the 2004 All-Star Game break, but he was only 4-5 afterward with an alarming 6.92 earned run average. There had been some talk in baseball that he had altered his delivery by lowering his arm angle and perhaps was hiding an injury, which he denied.

One baseball executive said the Dodgers had come to believe that Vazquez did not want to pitch on the West Coast and might invoke his contractual right to demand a trade for the 2006 season. There was also speculation that Vazquez, to underline his opposition, might have refused to take a physical for the Dodgers, and that this was behind the health concern cited by DePodesta.

In the three-way deal, Vazquez and the prospects Dioner Navarro and Eric Duncan would have gone to the Dodgers. In turn, the Dodgers would have sent outfielder Shawn Green, starter Brad Penny, reliever Yhency Brazoban and a minor leaguer to the Diamondbacks. The Yankees would have received Johnson from the Diamondbacks, as well as the left-handed starting pitcher Kazuhisa Ishii from the Dodgers.

The Dodgers were looking to use the deal to free up money to sign the free-agent outfielder J.D. Drew and strengthen their pitching staff. They might have also attempted to trade Vazquez. The Dodgers indicated yesterday, however, that they were not certain they could sign Drew and thus did not want to lose Green, a valuable left-handed hitter.

"I've been saying all along that we wouldn't do the deal unless it made sense for the 2005 club," DePodesta said in a conference call with Los Angeles reporters. "Certainly, there were things in this deal that specifically didn't work out. There were a lot of things we tentatively agreed upon, but there were certain details we needed to work through."

DePodesta, who has been the target of criticism in Los Angeles for even considering the three-way trade, was upset that reports of the deal emerged in New York on Friday, when he did not believe an agreement had been reached. While the Yankees submitted some paperwork on the trade to the commissioner's office yesterday, the Dodgers resisted, prompting widespread confusion.

The Yankees' only certainty last night was that the free-agent pitcher Carl Pavano, lured from the Florida Marlins with a four-year contract, would be introduced at a news conference at 1 p.m. today at Yankee Stadium. The meeting with Beltran, while positive, was preliminary. And the talks with the Diamondbacks are becoming repetitive.

The Yankees still say they can scrape together a package to trade for Johnson, a five-time Cy Young award winner, and snare Beltran, who already has a six-year offer worth about $84 million from the Houston Astros. But if yesterday was any indication, acquiring a superstar is not always an easy proposition, even for the Yankees.

Murray Chass contributed reporting for this article.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2004, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: BASEBALL; Dodgers Sink Three-Way Trade for Johnson. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe